NOS4A2

by Joe Hill

Thornton resented the way little boys disappeared into the glowing screen, ditching the real world for some province of the imagination where fun replaced thought and inventing creative new kills was an art form. She had fantasized having a child who would love books and play Scrabble and want to go on snowshoeing expeditions with her. What a laugh.

The Brat’s father was silent for a while, and then he said, “Jesus. What an ugly fuckin’ person you are inside. And I had a kid with you.”

What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.”

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

“Mm,” said Peace-not-War. “Well. That’s helpful. We’ll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I’m not hopeful it’ll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can’t catch him.”

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.

almost ill with love for him. Ill—and guilty. Even then some part of her already knew she was going to leave him someday. Even then some part of her felt that Lou—Lou and Wayne both—deserved better than Vic McQueen.

Maybe if she were not stupid enough to have had a baby. She hated that she’d had the baby. Now she was fucked. She loved Wayne too much to press the pedal to the floor and go flying into the darkness. She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.

It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.

The light that slanted in through the windows was cold and blue, and motes of dust turned within the bars of sunshine, as if the church were the interior of a snow globe just beginning to settle.

So many of man’s inventions—the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun—were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

On some level he had come to view his situation as almost natural. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.

HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. Someday Hicks was going to Google that one, find out what the hell it meant.

She bought tennis rackets, didn’t know if Wayne knew how to play. It had been so long for herself that she couldn’t even remember how to score. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

She packed the swimsuits, her bristol boards and inks and watercolors, the dog, and the boy she loved but was afraid she didn’t know or deserve, and they hauled it north for the summer.

When she was on coke—yeah, she had done that, too—she could’ve struggled with the knot for a happy hour, enjoying it as much as sex.

You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.

Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

Happiness will do more for you than any wonder drug the apothecaries can invent!”

She met Hutter’s gaze without blinking or flinching. Vic had been hammered, shot at, nearly run over, institutionalized, addicted, had come close to being burned alive and had run for her life on several occasions. An unfriendly stare was nothing.

Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity.

She had made him in her body. Manx could not simply unmake him with his car.

She was only sixteen at the time, just a nub of a thing, graceful and considerate and shy. This is the way with many women. In youth they are precious gems of possibility. They shudder with feverish life and desire. When they turn spiteful, it is like a chick molting, shedding the fuzz of youth for darker feathers! Women often give up their early tenderness as a child gives up his baby teeth.”

Children, though, didn’t stand back from the puzzle and look at the whole thing. They pretended they were Search Engine, the hero of the story, down inside the puzzle itself, and they looked at only the little bit he could see, each step of the way.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

He was so young. Vic couldn’t imagine dating him, let alone being arrested by him.

“WHEN THE ANGELS FALL, THE CHILDREN GO HOME.”

“You think sunspot, huh? You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic fuck.”

Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done—cook an omelet, change lightbulbs, make with hugging—sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

Her father did not reply. His head remained bowed. “For what it’s worth, Mr. McQueen,” Lou said, “I believe every crazy-ass word of this.”

“How come you believe me?” “Because you’re my girl,” he said. He said it so plainly and gently that she couldn’t help hating him, felt a sudden, unexpected sickness rising in her breast. She had to look away. Had to take a deep breath to keep her voice from shuddering with emotion.

don’t expect you to forgive me. I made some choices that are unforgivable. The worst things you think about me—they’re all true. But I love you and always have, and if I can do anything to help you now, I will.”

“They love you,” he said to her. “The mosquitoes. They love all that tender lady flesh, gently marinated in grad school. You probably taste like veal.”

He held on to her, arm around her waist. His gaze reminded Lou of certain mountain lakes that appeared crystalline and pure because acid rain had killed everything in them.

“I’m going with you,” Lou said. “Wayne’s my fuckin’ kid, too. Anyway. We had a deal, remember? I fix the bike and you take me along. You don’t get to go off and do this thing without me being there to make sure you don’t blow the both of you up. Don’t worry. I’ll ride bitch seat.”

sounded like delusion until you remembered that people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

“You’re a good man, Lou Carmody. I may be one crazy bitch, but I love you. I’m sorry about a lot of things I put you through, and I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I am not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”

Please. I was brave once, let me be brave again. Let me be brave for Wayne and Vic. I’m going to die anyway, so let me die the right way.

“You’re the best, Lou Carmody. You’re not just a good man. You are a real honest-to-God hero. And I don’t mean because you put me on the back of your motorcycle and drove me away from this place. That was the easy part. I mean because you’ve been there for Wayne every single day. Because you made school lunches and you got him to his dentist appointments and you read to him at night. I love you, mister.”

Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

She recognized what she was feeling as pain, but it was also, like childbirth, an experience bigger than pain, a feeling that something impossible was being made possible, that she was about to complete some enormous undertaking.

Bats gushed out of the bridge around her into the night, all of them, all her thoughts and memories and fantasies and guilt: kissing Lou’s big, bare chest the first time she ever took off his shirt; riding her ten-speed in the green shade of an August afternoon; banging her knuckles on the carburetor of the Triumph as she worked to tighten a bolt. It felt good to see them fly, to see them set free, to be set free of them herself, to let go of all thought at last.

Vic felt very easy in her mind. She was not sure there was much of anything left in there now, except for love, and that was enough.

“Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes. You’re okay. You’ll always be okay.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. ’S okay. I think you’re suffering from the human condition.” “Can you die from that?” Wayne said. “Yes,” Lou said. “It’s pretty much fatal in every case.” Wayne nodded. “Okay. Well. I guess that’s good.”

Lou said, “If Santa tries to come down our chimney, I’ll send him back up with my boot in his ass. It’s a promise.”